My mother is treated kindly, paid decently. But also, she is lonely. She has a girlfriend or two among the other staff, but they go home to husbands—or go out to find one.
The staff is legion. Among those who tend the outdoors, there is a head gardener. Perhaps he is called a groundskeeper. He contemplates the proper irrigation, trains the men who prune and weed and make sure the fountains drain well. He wields a certain power.
He has a wife and two children, but they live in a real home “out there,” beyond the walls of the hotel. Let’s say his name is Leonard.
I am seven. The war is well over—which makes just about everyone happier, even if it doesn’t make them richer. I remember, more than once, men in uniform walking through the gardens of the hotel, how heads turned, nodding with approval or admiration. I think about what I know of my father, the way he died. My mother did have one picture of him in uniform, before he went to his own, earlier war, which she brought from a drawer when I asked. Already he looked miserable. (Of course he was.) His war has been gratefully pushed out of memory by the newer war, the one any simpleton on the street can justify, at least in retrospect.
One thing I know at age seven is that I will grow up to be anything but a man in uniform. In the library of the hotel hang beautiful dark paintings, mostly landscapes and still lifes. (One, which mystifies and spooks me, is of a dead rabbit lying on a stone next to a stalk of wilting roses.) In the hotel’s small chapel, there are also dark paintings. There are Madonnas and saints, but there are also flowers and fruits and landscapes with fraught, tempestuous skies. I tell my mother I want to make pictures. She spares me a frugal supply of the cheap buff-colored paper she uses to package the pressed table linens, to protect them from the red dust that drifts invisibly everywhere and settles on everything. (When I bathe after playing outside, the water turns a rusty pink.) Sometimes she gives me a pad of lined paper from the hotel office. For Christmas, she gives me watercolor paints: a box containing six disks of color and two brushes. I can still see it clearly; my fingers remember gripping those spindly shafts.
I begin to paint the cactuses and flowers around the grounds. I try to memorize birds I see in passing, to paint them, too. Leonard, as he makes his rounds in this horticultural paradise, often stops to admire my work. Leonard also takes care of the one cat on the grounds, kept here to ward off mice. It’s an elusive creature, that cat, though I try to draw it whenever I find it resting from its predatory labors. For the most part, everyone else ignores me in a benevolent way. Guests smile blandly as they pass me. A woman might touch my head, as if to bless me.
The hottest months, when school is out, are the ones I spend mostly outdoors. My mother makes me wear a hat, but still my skin burns. At night she scolds me, tells me to sit in the shade, rubs white salve over my nose and cheeks and knees. “If this happens again,” she warns me, “I’ll have to keep you cooped up inside.” An empty threat, because she does not have the time to police my comings and goings.
One day Leonard spots me, huddled in the shade of an awning by the pool, my face probably peeling. He tells me that there’s a place I could work in his shed—and there are resting plants that would love to have their portraits drawn. “You understand the value of drawing from life more than most children your age,” he says. “I am very impressed.” I blush at the flattery, which works wonders.
I’ve passed the shed a hundred times but never been inside. It’s a large structure on the edge of the property, under a big cottonwood that grows by a trickle of a stream, and it’s larger than your average potting shed. The demands of this beautiful garden would be many and complex. Inside, it’s dim—though only at first—and cool, a rackety fan moving the air in circles. Dozens of tools—clippers and scythes and machetes and saws with slim but sturdy blades—hang on hooks across a wall. Shelves hold burlap sacks of fertilizers, pesticides, lime, birdseed, and peat moss; cans bleeding dark rust-tainted oils; terra-cotta pots in tall snug stacks. “My kingdom,” says Leonard.
Oddly, there’s a weary couch against a wall. The cat, caught shirking, jumps off and dashes out the door.
“Sometimes I sneak a nap,” Leonard says, then holds a finger to his lips.
A skylight and one side window facing a hedge illuminate the space, along with a few suspended bulbs. Anyone who’s been to the movies enough would see the place as sinister. I see it as a laboratory, a library, a place to do as one pleases in privacy and peace. I like the idea that the cat might keep me company here.
“And how about this.” Leonard points to a door, opens it, ushers me in. It leads into a smaller room with a workbench and stool, a gooseneck lamp. Leonard uses a hand to sweep sawdust off the rough wood surface. “You can work here.”
The room is stuffy and smells of sulfur and dirt, but it’s sumptuously quiet. Several potted plants, in varying states of prosperity, languish on a shelf beneath a purple light.
“The convalescent ward,” Leonard tells me. “Plants on probation.” He’s tall, his head nearly brushing the unpainted ceiling. “And now…wait, my friend…there’s this.”
He bends down and opens a drawer in the workbench. He pulls out a flat box and slides it open: it’s a set of pastels in two dozen colors. In a book, I’ve seen pictures of ballet dancers by Degas in pastel, and in the schoolroom we have colored chalk, but these are a luxury. CARAN D’ACHE, says the box in a scarlet flourish. I wonder what the word “ache” has to do with the alluring contents, but I don’t ask. I do know I ache to use them.
From the magic drawer, he also hands me a tablet of thick, toothy paper, white as powdered lime. “Yours,” says Leonard.
And it begins. With no schoolwork to take me away from my pictures, I go to the shed as often as I can. All I tell my mother is that I’ve found a way to stay out of the sun. This makes her happy. As long as I’m on the hotel grounds, she knows I’ll be safe, watched over. And as long as I read—which I do, every night after dinner, while she listens to the radio and presses our own clothes—I am free to do as I like all day long.
Sometimes she’ll say she is spoiling me, that if my father were still alive, I’d be learning his craft—or “whatever men teach their sons,” she says, sounding sad but also dismissive. I can tell she feels sorry for me.
The hotel stands at the edge of the town, and though there are a few other boys with parents who live on or near the grounds, they prefer athletic pastimes. That summer I’m left to my own devices, and at first I am content. Sometimes I do wonder whether, if my father were alive, I might have brothers and sisters. I wouldn’t have to entertain myself. On the other hand, I begin to realize that I like entertaining myself.